Awake: an Unexpected Love Story Women and Younger

Women. 55-70. New York City.

Daniel is a thirty-six-year-old ER nurse in Chicago who knows what he wants. He’s known since he was old enough to understand what he was looking at. He stopped apologizing for it at thirty.

Gina is sixty-five. Recently retired. Dark hair with silver she hasn’t bothered to dye. Thirty-two years as a recovery room nurse. A widow who remarried because that’s what you did and divorced because she couldn’t keep pretending. A woman who put the Ramones on her dating profile like a flare she wasn’t sure anyone would receive.

He was the one who saw it.

What starts as a message about a song becomes a conversation neither of them can stop having. Phone calls at two in the morning. His voice in her ear on Tuesday nights. A safety net she builds with careful words — it’s not a date, we just like the same music — that starts to come apart the first time she hears him laugh.

She hasn’t been touched in two years. She hasn’t been seen in longer than she’s willing to count.

He sees her.

Not the version she shows the world. Not the retired nurse. Not the responsible mother. Not the woman who eats dinner alone and goes to bed alone and gives herself whatever pleasure she can manage behind a locked door. He sees the woman underneath all of that — the one who is still hungry, still reckless, still capable of being completely undone by something she didn’t see coming.

A week in New York. A dinner where the ghosts sit at the table with them. A kiss in a bar she runs from and can’t outrun. A hotel room where she stops being careful. Her bedroom where she lights candles and lets a man half her age see every year on her body and doesn’t look away.

And a morning after — when her daughter walks in and asks the question Gina has been avoiding since November:

You think this can work?

The answer will break your heart.

Awake is the second book in the Older Women and Younger Me series — a raw, intimate, unflinching love story about desire, age, grief, and what happens when a woman who thought she was done feeling something feels everything at once.

This book contains explicit sexual content and is intended for adult readers.